Half Moon Theatre

Case Study

Half Moon Theatre

Mixed Document Scanning

National Heritage

The Half Moon Theatre was founded in London's East End in the 1970s. The Half Moon continues today as a specialist theatre for young audiences, giving young people from birth to 18 (25 for disabled young people) an opportunity to experience the best in young people's theatre, both as a participant and as an audience member.

The Half Moon's archive of photographs, posters, programmes, production notes and scripts etc., provides a fascinating insight into the history of the theatre itself and of the prevailing wider community and national issues. Digitising this archive is part of a Heritage Lottery Fund project, Stages of Half Moon, to make details of the company's rich and diverse history accessible to the public whilst encouraging participation in the Theatre's future.

The documents were in a variety of formats and sizes, from small photographs to larger than A2 size posters. Due to the fragility and value of some of the pieces, the client specified that a rotary scanner could not be used therefore everything was digitised on flatbed/overhead scanners.

Once scanned to lossless, uncompressed TIFF format, additional copies were made in JPEG and PDF formats. The PDF copies of the images were also OCRed to facilitate easier searching of text. The images were then placed into a directory structure compatible with the Royal Holloway Archives where much of the source material is stored.